Introducing David Snopek, and what I got from him

I first got to know about David Snopek through his blog. I'm not sure whether it is still active, as its last post is dated March 2014. No matter - I'll just recount how and where I heard of him, and what that he had to say, or write, I found useful.

I was in Japan, I believe. And although I wasn't interested in learning Polish at the time (I'm more interested now) his free ebook of general principles intrigued me.

David was the first person I'd come across to use real material to pick up a language. Specifically, he used Harry Potter. David went into some detail explaining how to work though Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - or maybe the sorcerer's stone -  word for word, sentence by sentence, page by page.

I loved that idea. And I discovered that I could pick up Japanese copies of the series for peanuts.

In a(nother's) nutshell

If only the author of this video had gone on to create a language-learning channel, then I'd be out of a job!

• Sink language so that it can be used on the fly.
• 4 clear points to take you from 0% to maybe 20%
• Acquisition, not learning
• "Comprehensible input" - Krashen

Choose your own

Listen, Son, to what I have to say about comprehensible input. It's not something new you need to learn; you've used it in the past.

When you needed to learn Dutch after your family moved there, you did that through reading Ot en Sien and Kruimeltje. Later, when the folks returned to New Zealand and you needed to switch back to English, you read Superman comics, the Famous Five and you scoured the Children's Library shelves labelled Myths and Legends from Many Lands.

That's how you got yourself comprehensible input - by hunting down  interesting material at your level.

It’s possible thereafter to expand the difficulty limit of the material if you have a way to making it understandable (i.e. cheating is allowed.)

If you already know the story, that’s good (unless you are disinclined to re-read books or watch movies again and again). But you could get around that by seeking more by the same author, or by continuing in that genre.

If your listening is at a level where it supplements your understanding, then listen to the audiobook at the same time as you follow along on paper or the screen.

And if you read on screen, you might use an application that gives you the meaning of words when you scroll over them.

 
Yes, there are always means and ways.

Hurry, don't worry

There used to be a TV show: Kreskin. He was a mentalist / magician. He'd mind read and predict. Entertainment.

His show had a live audience. He'd call on members of that audience. He'd ofter tell them to "take you time, but hurry".

Now, that would make a great catch-phrase in the arena of language learning. You need to engage with focus, yet not engage your conscious brain. It's a question of focus-mode thinking versus diffuse-mode.

This is too easy!

I easily spent time on 3 languages this morning. It may prove almost too easy to learn a number of them quickly. It takes almost no effort to follow along as I listen. I hardly have to concentrate. I'm not required to remember anything. I don't need to study, look up words or do exercises. And yet I feel that I'm learning very quickly.

But let me spell out what my intentions are.

I want to get used to hearing and reading various languages. I'm talking about input. If I could achieve just the ability to listen and to read, I'd be happy. To actually speak or write languages is not my immediate goal. Output would comes after. My 'immediate' goal is to be able to understand my target languages.

At present I've only tackled Japanese, Dutch and German. You could call them my 'cheat' languages since I've already put in time with them. But I can predict that a whole bunch of others will come almost as easily. French, Spanish, Italian, and a Scandinavian language for fun. 

Their alphabets are more or less familiar to me. So are at least a hundred or more words. I'm convinced that with such a foundation my ListenRead techniques will work like a dream.

I suspect that the only difficulty may consist of mixing similar languages up e.g. Spanish and Portugese; Swedish, Danish and Norwegian; Russian, Czech and Polish.

But as long as each language has a distinctive 'flavor' (e.g. having its own alphabet) then I don't anticipate any problem.

Still, I'd happily admit that it's still early days.

What I got from Johan Cruijff

The late Johan Cruijff was a famous Dutch football player - one of the top five, probably, in the world. I got to know of him back in 1974. That was when Holland reached the final of the soccer world cup for the very first time. He was the embodiment of Total Football. But along with his skill, it's another aspect of his outlook that I admire even more.

Johan treated football as a game. Of course, he no doubt took it seriously to have achieved what he did. Nevertheless, he remained playful. Take a look at any 'footage' of the man, and analyse his body language. He was always relaxed. He always had fun.

So much so, that when the 1978 world cup held in Argentina looked likely to become overly serious in a political sense, with threats made against players, Johan simply decided to sit it out. He put his safety and his family first. 

Football is only a game.

Anything is only a game.

The more relaxed you are able to remain, the better, paradoxically, you will become at it.

Supersonic Unlearning

My recent interest in language acquisition started in about 2013 back when I was living in Japan. I trace it back to the day of my daughter's third birthday. 

She got the presents. I got a boot up the bum (figuratively speaking). Because that's the day I discovered that she had overtaken me in Japanese. I could no longer understand what she said. I couldn't keep up with her rate of learning!

As a parent, it does NOT feel good to discover such a thing (and neither did it make her feel secure). I felt stupid and useless. I'd been rendered dumbfounded, in the original sense of the word. And me a language teacher!

Not being able to understand her words was one thing. Not understanding how this situation had come about was another. Sure, I’d only been learning the language half-heartedly, but my daughter hadn't been studying at all! 

She’d never been near a school. She didn't know the concepts of grammar, vocabulary, memory, and revision. She'd only just learned to read. She could barely use a pencil.

We all accept that children pick up a language more quickly than adults. But why should that be an acceptable thing? With all the benefits of education, shouldn't we be doing better? 

In truth, language instruction works poorly. If only 1 in 20 adults who set out to learn another language succeed (I suspect that this refers to English-speaking adults), as compared to 20 out of 20 babies, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And it isn’t Danish! 

What was the problem? What's the solution?

I concluded that the puzzle is actually a no-brainer. Which is to say that both the problem and the solution stem from how we use our brains. Babies and adults have the same brains. They just use them differently.

I believe that we've been seduced by the achievements of Science. We've been sucked into using only a conscious, left brain style of thinking. The education system whole-heartedly champions logical, analytical learning processes. It has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. "Oh no! That's childish. Let's not do it that way anymore. We're all grown up now."

But really—rather than replace the natural way how babies acquire language with our grown-up notions of Scientific learning, we need to meld the two methods. Quite simply, we've got to balance our brains. We've got to pick up a language and learn it so as to acquire it in the best possible way.    

Long story short—with what I discovered I set out to . . .

1. Improve my Japanese
2. Help my daughter master English
3. Publish a book showing Japanese people how to learn English, and
4. Collaborate with innovative people to trial my ideas 

I've done, or am doing, the first three. I'm keen to make a start on the fourth.

Basically, I wish to test my hypothesis that anyone can acquire any language, starting any time, at any rate, and without any study. 

I did it. 
My daughter did it. 
You did it—that was how you learned English—therefore anyone can do it.